This time it’s completely acceptable to say more is more, could this finally shift the productivity stakes in the lightning favour? It’s one less reason not to be happy that’s for sure!

Okay, that’s enough, so what else is in store this Winter?

I found out the hard way that changing owner was a singleton affair when I tried to change the owner for 10 records at a time.

Of course, there are custom solutions which plug the gap but nothing is better than an out of the box feature! I’m glad I was only working with a simple custom object and not cases as I can hear the screams from here! Screams of joy now!

Next feature is a bit of killer I reckon, the ABCDEF… Search filters felt more dated than Salesforce Classic; what could be handier than a nifty filter right inline in the list view which filters the results as you type!

Next up we have something which nearly made it into our Bright Idea post, thankfully Salesforce beat us to it! Yes, I’m talking List View sharing, we can only wonder why it wasn’t here until now, say no more!

Can I get a productivity?

PRODUCTIVITY

Yes, it’s cheesy!

This release is looking like a stonker full of many awesome features, let’s continue…

It’s time to forgive Salesforce for Slacking off in the Chatter department, now your chitty chat gets saved as a draft – #nice

Customisation improvements see some real gems.

Custom permissions; if you’ve experimented with this feature you will know these add granular control over many aspects of your org like logic within validation rules as one example. Custom permissions can now be used to dynamically control this displaying of lightning page components – now it’s easier to add custom permissions to profiles and perm sets rather than creating a bunch of fields on the user object to handle page components

Next things just got a whole lot less annoying especially if your like me and tend to over click – Lightning Components no longer get auto-added to pages! No more I didn’t want that there! Can you relate?

Let’s jump to Lightning flow, these days I am finding myself slipping back into love and this is not due to the intermittent new flow designer appearing on the horizon. More the way they have opened up the ability to blend lightning components with flow screens –

Salesforce is championing the no-code / low-code approach hard these days! Similar to what we have seen in the past with Apex limits being increased over time, now the Process limits are being lifted up to allow more automation to be created using the declarative tools:

Per-Org Limit

Summer ’18 and Earlier

Winter ’19

Total processes and flows

1,000

4,000

Active processes and flows

500

2,000

Groups of scheduled actions or flow interviews that are waiting to be processed

30,000

50,000

Before I jump into the juice UX bits with Flow, something which has been the bane of my life but softened somewhat by the wonderful folks at Gearset who allow for flows to be deployed and activated, a given for anyone trying to operate in a CI/CD world.

I mentioned I am fan blend Lightning Components with Flow Screens which is a nice low-code way to leverage components, but if your looking for a no code way then Winter 19 brings a whole host of new screen elements which you can take advantage of – here is a quick summary

Display Dependent Picklists

Capture Names

Let users opt out with new Toggle

Let users select a number with new Slider

Capture and validate email addresses

Capture phone numbers

Capture URLs

And there is more on the Flow front…

Flow now remembers previously entered values

Track process and Flow Test coverage

Test Scheduled Actions and Waiting Flows

There is more, but I am going to have to stop and say this – Salesforce is doubling and tripling down on Flow as you can tell now as we push into the new low-code era love it or hate it!

And on that note, let’s jump into Professional Developer territory to round this post out…

Lightning performance is improving all the time but still needs work. Salesforce know this and have gifted us these two new features to help with this”

Akamai is the leaders in the web optimisation space and with Lightning, you now have the option to have static content served up from their CDN network. Remember it’s not for developing with but something which you would want to enable in production when you push your finished components live! Don’t forget!

A little more on the cacheable front, there is a new annotation parameter called cacheable

Marking your method as cacheable tells Salesforce to take cached data from the client-side storage without waiting for the server trip. Previously you had to remember to add code to every JavaScript action that was calling a method – less code wins here

There is so much for developers in this release it probably warrants a post in its own right – so I am going to cherry pick a few more items which I am personally glad are finally coming down the pipeline…

Nice segue into this Change Data Capture Developer preview, this is going to be awesome and extremely useful – my current project I am working on compliance based architectures and filling data lakes, hope the path to GA is quick for this.

Here we’re finally the last developer feature – whilst this was a developer preview item, one item which is going GA in Winter 19 is unlocked packages